so if i wait for a holiday
by andthenshesaid
Summary: It's Christmas and she's smiling at him. Anna/Etienne fluff.


**so if i wait for a holiday**

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It's Christmas and she's smiling at him –

Anna Oliphant, who likes bananas, who was a girl scout, who wakes up with tangled hair and never seems to notice that anyone exists when she watches movies, and she's sitting across from him on the floor of his dorm room, 10 AM on Christmas morning, with her messy hair in a ponytail and the blonde streak showing and a grin breaking her face.

And that's a sight to wake up to, really, his girlfriend in his dorm room and one of Josh's sketches hanging on the wall next to a map of Europe one of his mates got him in 7th grade and two skinny window letting in a bit of light, spilling all over his crumpled covers and the bookshelf in the corner.

This, he thinks, has to be the best Christmas that he's ever had. Not that the bar has been set all that high.

(Because ever since he was 4 and something had broken that little thing he had, that his father was a good person, there had been things like _really, darling, you shouldn't let him just rip open his presents like that, have you not been teaching him tact, there's this boarding school I heard about, really teaches them the right stuff _and his mother crying on the 26th with the water running and he'd want to go in and hug her and make everything okay because that was what you did with people you loved, but she'd lock the door and he'd go into his room and curl up into himself and try not to think.)

There was this one when his father had decided to stay in Paris with one of his new artists, probably a skinny blonde one with nicotine on her breath and an apartment plastered with indie band posters and a name like _Amelie_ or _Nicolette_, but he didn't dwell on that.

And he'd been seven and that morning his mother had served leftover birthday cake – hers was on the 23rd and it was the fancy dark chocolate kind that came from the luxury restaurants his father frequented, but it was cake and it was very hard to ruin cake – and he'd gotten the gifts in his stocking, things like a scarf she attempted to knit and magnets shaped like breakfast foods and cookies from his favorite bakery with a swirly _E _written on them in icing.

He'd known they weren't from Santa Claus. His father hadn't believed that children needed that, in their lives. "You shouldn't be filling his head with shit like this," he'd said, when he was talking to his mum in the kitchen and Etienne had been eavesdropping, and his mum had said something like "you're right, I'm sorry" and that had been the end of that.

Then they'd walked the block to his grandparents and he'd sat in his grandfather's study while they waited for his grandmere to finish cooking. His grandfather's study was covered in maps and ink sketches and at seven he'd never been sure exactly what he did, but it always smelled like leather and books and Etienne used to sit underneath the desk in the center of the room and listen while his grandfather made business calls. That Christmas – it had been just like always, but his father hadn't been there to make snide comments about how much his mother was eating or complain about the imaginary dirt underneath Etienne's fingernails. Grandmere sometimes said things like that too, to his mum – but it wasn't when Etienne was around, usually. He remembers slipping his turkey to the two fluffy dogs that were always underfoot because he preferred the ham and the oysters that his mates didn't eat, but they were grandmere's favorite. He remembers his mother had given him a painting she'd done and his grandfather had given him a stack of old books and his grandmere had given him clothes, straight from the department store's crisp, white packaging, but the card was filled with her fancy calligraphy.

And then later, he and his mother had set on the edge of their window, and she'd sketched the people walking by and he'd had a mug of hot chocolate.

That – that had been good. But the rest… He doesn't like to think about those, doesn't like to think about his father at all, really, because when he does –

It doesn't matter.

It's Christmas and his lovely, brilliant girlfriend is next to him.

"Happy Christmas." He says.

"What _is _this?" She asks.

He slides off the bed. She's shaking the tiny, wrapped box that he'd left with one of her roommates the day before.

"You could open it."

"Yeah – but I wanted to do that together."

And he kisses her, slow and sweet – just because he can picture her waking up, always too early even on _Christmas_, and taking the train over to Berkeley and she's wearing socks with bananas on them and a jumper on over the shirt she must have slept in and he loves her, he really does.

"Let me see mine." He says, after a bit. She grins and pulls a package out of her bag.

"Can we open them at the same time?"

"Of course. What kind of heathens would we be if we didn't?"

She laughs at him, laughs with him. She's beautiful when she laughs.

Anna, predictably, opens her present with the uttermost care, cutting the tape with her fingernail and untying the knot.

He rips his off and throws it at her, just to see her face, only then she's actually opening and he stops for a second, because he wants to watch her – to see if she smiles, to see if she wrinkles her nose, to see if she laughs again.

The box only has a ticket in it. He got Hercules to let him have one of the smaller theaters – and okay, by let him have, he meant he wasn't getting paid for his next three shifts, but it is _Christmas_ – and they were going to screen _Lost in Translation _and _Somewhere_, just the two of them and Sophie Coppola and Scarlett Johansson and Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning.

He hopes she likes it. There's a banana sticker on the ticket.

"Oh – _wow_." She says, her eyes scanning the card. "Coppola – you. You are my favorite."

He looks down at the half-wrapped present in his lap. Books – _The Alchemist _and _Love in the Time of Cholera _and _the Unbearable Lightness of Being_ and they all smell like the used book store across the street from the theater.

He looks up at her.

She's tugging at that bleached streak in her hair. "I went when you were in class one day. And then, uh – you remember? When you got me that Neruda book in Paris and _i love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul _and I've seen the movies for _Cholera _and _Lightness of Being, _but then I wanted three because it's just so much _neater_. So, I don't know if _the_ _Alchemist _is good but the girl at the shop – the one who always wears her hair in pigtails – she said it was good. And – you like it, right? It's good?"

Etienne wants to tell her that she is the loveliest person he's ever met, ever known, ever even thought about existing. He wants to tell her that he doesn't care what the world has in store – because probably they'll end up eating grilled cheese at his mum's for lunch and then going to the movies and he'll sit and watch her stare at the screen and wonder how he ever got so lucky and then they'll go off with her family, but maybe there will be a zombie apocalypse and they'll have to run away in the car his roommate left when he went home for Christmas or maybe his mother will call and say that she's got a project to do and instead of her house, they'll go to the park and he'll leave his phone in his room so he can pretend he's missing his dad's call and they'll just stretch out on the grass and watch the clouds, but really, he could do anything with her and he would be the happiest person in the universe. And he wants to say all that, to say it right, but he just can't say it quite right without sounding like an arse – so instead he'll do things like renting out theaters and going to used book stores to buy her poetry and smiling at her and, one of these days, she is going to stop tugging at her hair and looking nervous and worried that he won't like his Christmas present.

And then he leans in and kisses her so hard he can't breathe.

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**okay, honestly, i don't know if there's even an ff following for aatfk? (there should be, because it's a brilliant book and everyone should read it and fall in love) but this has been up on lj for a month already, so... msldjf. organization. **

**please don't favorite without reviewing **


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